


young and reckless

by theriveroflight



Series: From Under the Eiffel Tower: Spin the Record [1]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Ladynoir | Adrien Agreste as Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng as Ladybug, NaNoWriMo 2020, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:48:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27578728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theriveroflight/pseuds/theriveroflight
Summary: Brothers and sisters, put this record down:Take my advice, cause we are bad news
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Series: From Under the Eiffel Tower: Spin the Record [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2015888
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19
Collections: Miraculous: Spin The Record Challenge





	young and reckless

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from Fall Out Boy's "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Title of This Song so We Wouldn't Get Sued." Prepare for more absurdly long titles in these notes.
> 
> Welcome to my first entry for NOIRequin's Spin the Record challenge! I am writing for Fall Out Boy's album From Under the Cork Tree to pay respect to 2000s pop punk, which has changed my music taste quite a bit.
> 
> This is also my NaNoWriMo project for 2020! I was aiming for 13k, and then one sprouted into a two-shot so I had to up to 14k, and I already have 10k written.
> 
> I'm like...less than halfway through, but not by too much.
> 
> Special thanks to Khanofallorcs and Ginhwi for beta reading.

“Come on, Ladybug.” Chat grins. “What’s a little late-night fun between friends?”

“I don’t want to put our reputations in jeopardy,” she answers. “I have the right to be worried.”

“There are ways around the peering eyes everywhere. Trust me, I would know.”

He’s being reckless. He’s being reckless, because he wants to tear himself inside out and destroy himself. And he only wants to do it with  _ Ladybug. _

If he needs to be self-destructive, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be than with her. They’re a team.

“Kitty, I don’t want you to throw everything away…”

“I just learned that we’re all doomed, what’s the point anymore? He’s probably going to steal it from me  _ in my sleep.  _ So I can’t sleep, I can’t go back, I have to be constantly vigilant.”

“What...what did you learn, Chat?”

“My father is Hawk Moth. I don’t think he knows about me, but it’s only a matter of time.”

“A matter of time — Chat, you know what this means, we have the chance to end this!”

“I don’t want this to end.”  _ I don’t want to lose you,  _ he thinks, hysterical and manic and everything like that in between. His thoughts are racing too quickly and he needs something, something to take his mind off the discovery, that his father is callous with his life and that his father is so not the person that Chat thought he was.

He can’t go back.

“You...said you didn’t want to know who I am. Unmasking him, you’ll  _ know.” _

“What if we’re strangers? What if we don’t know each other?”

“Even if you don’t  _ know  _ me as a civilian, I think you still  _ know  _ who I am outside of this. Almost everyone does, at least in Paris.” He's lying, on purpose. Because she  _ knows,  _ she delivered that beret, on top of other moments.

“Local—” Ladybug stops herself before she can say whatever she was going to. “I...don’t know what I’ll do once I do know.”

“You’re the Guardian. You decide,” he says. He doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter. He just needs to do something utterly stupid, that he’ll regret later but for now he can’t bring himself to.

“Chat, who is Hawk Moth?”

“I don't want to say.”

She feels a bit let down, but…

“Chat…”

“Yeah, I know. But…Hawk Moth is my father. That's stressful. I want to just...let go, do something monumentally awful that I’ll regret later.”

She steps closer to him and bundles him in a hug.

“Don’t do that,” she says, “I don’t want to lose you. Not now, not ever.”

“You’re not going to lose me.”

“I already have before.”

The words are chilling and sobering him, bringing the crashing train of thought away from his father and to Ladybug. How could she have lost him?

Oh. The sacrifices he’s made.

“But I’ve always come back.”

“You have nine lives, kitty, and I’m afraid that one day you’ll lose all of them, and I won’t be able to bring you back.”

“It’s okay. It’s fine. Let’s have fun tonight, milady. I don’t want to do this without you. I don’t want to lose myself without you being there to coax me back.”

“Chat, you’re being reckless.” Her tone is firm. “I don’t want you to throw yourself to the winds trying to forget, because it’s only a temporary distraction from the very real truth.”

He laughs. “Whoever said it was temporary? It’ll never end, I just have to keep not thinking about it. If I don’t think about it, then it’ll never sink in.”

“Well...there is something we can do. Nothing physically damaging, but something I’ve always wanted to do. But you have to promise me that you will stop to process and think about it before making any rash decisions.”

“I...can’t make that promise. Not now.”

“So come back to me when you can,” she says. “I refuse to let you hurt yourself over this.”

“I don’t want to think about him! About how he doesn’t care about me!”

“Does he know?”

“I don’t think so. But I’m scared that he’ll—you’re making me talk about it.” He narrows his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Are you  _ sure  _ that you don’t want to talk about it? You seemed awfully quick to start well, talking. And you  _ need  _ to talk about this. I don’t want you to hurt yourself because you don’t want to process anything.”

“I can’t right now! I don’t know what else I can do. I just...I know I need to be responsible, can we put that off to tomorrow?”

“Responsibility  _ never goes away.  _ Procrastination isn’t going to get you  _ anywhere,  _ Chat. Nowhere but even more hurt than before.”

“I’m already hurt. I’ve been hurt so many times. Where else do I have to go? What else can I do?”

“Well,” she says softly, “if you’re okay with telling me your identity, we can end this soon now that we know he’s your father. Bunnix said there will be another Butterfly later on, and more villains for us to take on together. You and me against the world, always. I’m not going to leave you. You need to know that I won’t leave you. Not again. I don’t want you to leave me. There’s no me without you.”

He starts to cry into her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m not ready, I’m not ready for this at all.”

“It’s okay to not be okay. Acknowledging that you aren’t is the first step. I’m sorry I pushed you.”

“It isn’t okay,” he answers. “But I acknowledge and accept your apology.”

“I know it’ll take a while to be okay. And we don’t have to go do it now. Rest. I’ll stay here as long as you need me to.”

She sits down, gently guiding him to sit next to her. He tries to rest his head on her shoulder, but the height difference makes it difficult for him to rest his head until she leans against him first.

“Okay.”

They both end up falling asleep on the roof, waking to the rising sun the next morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Expect more Ladynoir from these. I have 5 songs pretty much done save for minor editing, and a sixth over the halfway mark on writing. I am very excited to release track 5...
> 
> Be sure to subscribe to the SERIES, not this work.
> 
> And join us on the [Miraculous Fanworks Discord server](https://discord.gg/mlfanworks) if you're interested in meeting a growing community of creators and Miraculous Ladybug fans - where we both hold informal challenges like this and more formal challenges like exchanges.
> 
> Follow me elsewhere:  
> alto-tenure / main Tumblr  
> beunforgotten / writing Tumblr  
> riverofliight / Twitter (inactive)


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